Thursday, 31 May 2012

Streets Ahead is the
occasional column from London Walks' Pen David
Tucker…

"Will I see a
ghost?"

"What will we
see?"

Ah, the double
barrelled ghost walk question.

Short answer to the
first question: some people have. And their cameras have seen even more. We're
regularly sent photographs that clearly depict "presences" that the
photographer swears "was not there when I pointed the camera in that
direction".

The second question is
the more interesting one. And when we answer it we never give a shopping list
of "sights (or sites) that you'll see."

Don't give a shopping
list because it makes no allowance whatsoever for the guide, for the guide's
working his or her magic.

The guide is the
demiurge. (Gonna do a post one of these days on that very matter - just how apt
that word is in this context.) The demiurge. The artificer. The guide
"creates" the London that you see. A hapless, clueless tourist - or
indeed a Londoner in that state - can be standing fifteen feet away from a
London Walker and looking at exactly the same thing the walker is looking at.
But the hc tourist (or Londoner) won't be able to "see" what the
London Walker "sees".

The difference, of
course, is the guide. The guide is the demiurge, the artificer of what the
walker sees.

Usually of course it's
a matter of the guide directing the eye and the mind's eye. Fine-tuning the
gaze - telling you exactly where to look and what to look for. And blossoming
the mind's eye with the story that "informs"* what you're looking at.

But you know
something, sometimes it's just a simple matter of position. Something very
special will be visible from one side of a street but you can't see it at all
if you're a mere fifteen feet away - on the other side of the street.

Knowing where to take
you - and where to stand. It's often a very finely judged matter. And it makes
all the difference.

A case in point? Well,
we get this view on one of our ghost walks. (Pretty easy to make do with this
if you don't happen to see a ghost "on the night".)

"From the
mid-Victorian suspension bridge two great views can be seen: on one side
Buckingham Palace on an elevation; on the other the Horse Guards, the War
Office and Whitehall Court, rising in a distant mass and conveying an
impression, not anticipated by any architect, of some fabulous Eastern
city."

Wow.

*It's worth taking the
full measure of that word "informs" - "forms from within".

Wednesday, 30 May 2012

It’s a London
Thing is our Wednesday series in which we turn the spotlight on a unique aspect
of London – perhaps a curious shop, sometimes an eccentric restaurant, a hidden
place, book or oddity. The subject matter will be different every week. The
running theme, however, will remain constant: you have to come to London to
enjoy it. It’s A London Thing.

It’s a London Thing has dallied on the
Underground on many an occasion – the sights, the smells, the sounds, the
ambience, the history.

And we’re heading down the escalator again
this week, to celebrate the charms of an unsung stop on the Northern and Victoria
lines.

Warren Street. Could be the pen name of a
crime fiction writer. Or a minor celeb who hasn’t worked since he played the
baddie in EastEnders twelve years ago.

We’ll be frank. There’s not much there,
above ground that is. Nearby Fizrovia is fascinating, of course. But, with with apologies to French’s bookshop, and the second hand
camera place and the, er… well that’s pretty much it for the immediate vicinity of the station itself.

Which makes it, for my money, a Londoner’s
station. If you see someone getting off here, then the chances are they know
something you don’t. Or they are soon going to know something you don’t, given
the close proximity of University College.

Just down the line at Tottenham Court Road,
passengers leave the train with all the eager haste of pre-pubescent girls
mobbing a boy band.

At Euston Station, which comes just before
Warren Street, the crowds swarm aboard the tube train like adults taking flight having just
heard that boy band sing.

Not so Warren Street. Londoners dribble off
the train here in comparatively small numbers. Many of them will be changing
trains, heading for Oxford Circus (70 million passengers in 2010) or Waterloo
(81.5 million). Compare that with around 14 million for Warren Street.

The Victoria line dates from 1968, and its Warren
Street platforms feature a maze or labyrinth motif… geddit? Orange in colour,
it is Warren Street’s one concession to the Swinging Sixties. The Northern Line
platforms date from the early 20th century and have delicious,
blink-and-you’ll-miss-it detailing with an Edwardian flavour; the curly,
reassuring Way Out signs on the tiles; the station’s former name, Euston Road,
can be seen on the Northern Line platform. Best of all, the darker tiles on the
Northern Line platform, inlaid against the dominant creamy hued background. As
the train speeds through, these dark tiles seem to be black in colour. On close
inspection, however, they are the deepest blue, rich, midnight blue. It is a
lovely detail and very Warren Street: subtle. Waiting patiently to be
discovered. Not making a fuss. Photographs can't do the colour justice. Get up close and have a look next time.

Warren Street Station. It’s a London Thing.

POST UPDATED 29/9/16A London Walk costs £10 – £8 concession. To join a London Walk, simply meet your guide at the designated tube station at the appointed time. Details of all London Walks can be found at www.walks.com.

Our weekly slot in which we point you
in the direction of other great happenings and events in our great city. A new
exhibition, a gig, a museum, a pop-up-shop – the best of London within a few
minutes of a London
Walks walking tour.

Patriotic times indeed. The Queen’s Diamond
Jubilee. At such times, we are sent scrabbling for a definition of Britishness
in the ongoing post-Imperial era. Ongoing into eternity.

This quest takes many forms. Pop musicians
pose for pictures at dog racing tracks. Politicians spout guff, mis-quoting
George Orwell. Journalists polish up the platitudes they wheeled out for the
Golden Jubilee ten years ago. Celebrity TV presenters get commissioned to make
sound-bitey docos, the butterfly narratives of which flit from HM Queen to The
Beatles in the blink of an eye, in the hope that we’ll all forget about King
Edward VIII and the Sex Pistols altogether.

But for this writer, the spirit of
Britishness can be found in the short BBC broadcast of the shipping forecast.

The shipping forecast – compiled by the Met
Office and broadcast on BBC Radio 4 – is a weather forecast for the seas around
the British Isles.

It’s a few minutes of perfect Britishness.

Our conversational predilection for
chit-chat about precipitation (or sudden lack thereof) and our geographical
predicament are united in a pristine and brief broadcast over the airwaves a
great British institution. It’s delivered in a plummy British accent. We listen
obediently, not really sure what’s going on…

What can it mean? Most of us know not, but
the reassuringly clear BBC delivery lulls and calms us, allowing us to remember
our famous sense of moderation and decency and stiff upper-lippery as the waves batter our coast.

The delivery is in such a deliberate and
clear manner for those – in peril on the sea? – who need to write down the
information. That’s write down. With a pencil and paper. The old fashioned way.
And there’s nothing more British than being old fashioned. We are an island,
after all, and we often react slowly to change – all of which is encapsulated
in The Shipping Forecast.

If you do one other thing in London this
week running up to the Jubilee celebrations, listen to The Shipping Forecast on
BBC Radio 4. You can do so HERE.

It seems like an age ago now, but there was
once a time when football (by which me mean soccer) was a topic of conversation
reserved only for those in-the-know. A codified world, largely working class,
almost totally masculine.

Then came Nick Hornby’s book Fever Pitch.

Hornby’s eloquent memoir of the trials and
tribulations of life as an Arsenal supporter crossed over into the literary
mainstream, garnered great reviews outside the sports pages. And deservedly so.
It is a great book, by a great writer.

But then the deluge.

In the wake of Fever Pitch, football too
entered the middle class mainstream. Before long, every celeb, every telly
actor, every politician was shoehorning references to “footie” into their
public utterances.

If you’d like to know what the world was
like before such working class heroes as Tony Blair (ahem) and David Cameron
(ahem-ahem) were spouting off about their love for Newcastle United and Aston
Villa (!) then The Glory Game is the place to begin.

In the two decades before Fever Pitch,
Hunter Davies’s warts-and-all portrait of life behind the scenes at North
London’s Tottenham Hotspur Football Club was the only book on football. The
only one. Sure there were “memoirs” of retired pros, formulaic, ghostwritten
affairs intended as Christmas stocking fillers. But nothing insightful, nothing
that the clubs didn’t want us to know.

Davies’s book changed all that.

Published in 1972, Davies had enjoyed unprecedented
access to the club to research The Glory Game. This access included the
dressing room, the training ground and even the players’ homes. Davies witnessed
rivalries and conflicts first hand. Everything ended up in the book.

“His accuracy,” wrote former Arsenal and
Scotland goalkeeper Bob Wilson, “is sufficiently uncanny to be embarrassing.”

If Davies’s book was such a revolution, one
might ask, then why didn’t it start its own avalanche of copycats? The answer
is simple. His portrait of life behind the scenes at a major football club was
deemed by everyone inside the game to be so explosive that no writer was ever
allowed such unfettered access to a club again. In today’s climate, with every
club running a well-oiled publicity machine, it is unlikely that such access
will ever be granted.

The Glory Game, therefore, stands alone as a
fly-on-the-wall account of the internal politics of football. And it remains a
classic 40 years on.

POST UPDATED 19/3/16A London Walk costs £10 – £8 concession. To join a London Walk, simply meet your guide at the designated tube station at the appointed time. Details of all London Walks can be found at www.walks.com.

Monday, 28 May 2012

Monday is mute
on the London Walks
Blog (well, almost mute) – because Monday is the day when we post
five images captured in and around London by London Walks Guides, London
Walkers and Facebook friends. Collated on a theme or an area, if you've got
some great shots of our capital and want to join in send your pictures to the usual
address.